ABSTRACT
This chapter presents ten propositions on the lessons of the involvement of international organisations in what can be called 'the third Balkan war'. It seems necessary to resituate the conflicts which have bloodied the territory of former Yugoslavia since 1991 in a longer context, as proposed by the method of the historian Fernand Braudel. The Sainte Alliance and European Concert of the nineteenth century gave way to the United Nations, nonetheless it was a Contact Group, which Metternich himself would have been proud of, who finally played the major diplomatic role. A theoretical approach which divides the actors into local belligerents behaving with an irrational ethnic-tribal mentality, and the wise international community neutral and bringer of peace, is unsatisfactory. The chapter discusses international intervention models that have a different internal logic and a different relative weighting of local or international actors resulting in different outcomes.
